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One challenge facing the digitalized workplace is communication control, especially emotion regulation in which individuals try to manage their emotional experiences and/or expressions during organizational communication. Extant research largely focused on the facilitating role of a few media features (e.g. fewer symbol sets). This study seeks to provide a deeper understanding of media features that individuals, as receivers of negative emotions expressed by communication partners, could leverage to support regulating negative emotional communication in the workplace.

This study used qualitative research methods to identify media features that support regulating negative emotional communication at work. Data were collected using interviews and was analyzed using directed content analysis in which media features discussed in media synchronicity theory (MST) were used as the initial coding schema but the researcher was open to media features that do not fit with MST.

In addition to media features (and capabilities) discussed in MST, this study identified five additional media features (i.e. message broadcasting, message blocking, receiving specification, recipient specification and compartmentalization) and two underlying media capabilities (i.e. transmission control capability and participant control capability) that may support regulating negative emotional communication. Two major mechanisms (i.e. reducing or eliminating emotion regulation workload, and providing prerequisites or removing obstacles for emotion regulation) via which media features support emotion regulation were also identified.

This paper provides a more comprehensive understanding regarding communication media features that may support emotion regulation in particular and communication control in general. Findings of this study contribute to several literatures and may also transfer to other similar contexts.

Dashang refers to a reward given voluntarily to street performers in return for their performance. Some social media platforms have created a way to integrate this as a function, referred to as the dashang feature, to allow users to reward live performers online as well. Over the last few years, this function has become extremely popular among social media users, as it recreates the nostalgic experience of watching street performances. Platforms now consider it indispensable, as it has become a source of substantial revenue (commission on rewards earned by performers). However, not all users reward performers. For each user who pays, there are many more who lurk on the platform. This study examines the reasons for these differences using the Big Five personality perspective and justice theory.

We develop an empirical model using the Big Five theory and justice theory and test it using empirical data collected through a survey of WeChat users.

The results indicate that distributive justice, interpersonal justice and informational justice are essential factors in relation to social media users' use of the dashang feature. It is also found that personality type affects these three factors.

This study makes three key contributions. First, it examines the factors that influence users' voluntary use of the dashang feature using the lenses of the Big Five theory and justice theory. Second, this study extends previous results on perceived justice to examine use of the dashang feature in social media. Third, this study applies these theories to the study of consumer behavior by exploring the role of user characteristics in social media use.

This longitudinal study aims to analyze the use of websites by a sample of 78 corporations and non‐profits five years apart. In particular, it studies organizational use of interactive and social media features and use of web sites for building relationships with six stakeholder publics.

The authors studied the websites of 78 for‐profit and not‐for‐profit organization seeking to learn how they used this new medium as a communication tool to build and maintain relationships with six key stakeholders: the mass media, consumers, investor/donors, employees, the government, and the community in 2004 and in 2009. They also explored for differences in the way for‐profit corporations and non‐profits used their web sites for relationship building given their different missions and cultures.

First, there was a marked difference in how corporations and non‐profit organizations used their websites. Second, a significant number of organizations used social media applications such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube through their websites in 2009. Third, aside from increased use of social media, in 2009 more organizations used feedback mechanisms such as e‐surveys and e‐polls embedded in their websites, enhancing interactions with a variety of stakeholders. Both corporations and non‐profit organizations generally utilized their websites as information‐dissemination tools, where the information flow is one‐way, although the percentage of both corporations and non profits that used interactive features offered by new media has increased slightly between 2004 and 2009.

This study is among the few that compare web page use by corporations vs non‐profits. A second unique feature of this study is that it is longitudinal in nature, studying web site use five years apart by the same organizations.

Following the hierarchy-of-effects model, this study aims to propose a two-step process framework to investigate social media post efficacy via attraction and likes.

The study analyzes 113,785 social media posts from 126 WeChat official accounts to explore how external (headline features and account type) and internal (content features and media type) features impact social media post attractions and likes, respectively.

The antecedents of post attraction differ from those of post likes. First, headline features (punctuation, length, sentiment and lexical density) and account type significantly influence social media post attraction. Second, content features (depth, tone, domain specificity, lexical density and readability) and media type affect social media post likes.

First, this study considers online user engagement as a two-step process regarding social media posts and explores different influencing factors. Second, the study constructs new variables (account type and domain specificity) in each stage of the two-step process model.

Despite the significance of online communication and interactions, previous research has not systematically compared all features on a single platform from the users' perspective. This study aims to fill this gap by extensively reviewing the current literature on social media affordances and proposes and tests a feature-centric and affordance-based conceptualization of social media platforms (SMPs) between users, features, the audience and content.

This research surveys users on Facebook, one of the largest SMPs, and asks them to assess 20 features of Facebook on six relational affordances between users, features, audience and content. The data in this study were collected on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with participants from the US Correspondence analysis was employed to examine the relationship between affordances and the ties among affordances, features and outcomes.

Results of the study indicate that users perceive features differently, and employing features as the unit of analysis captures users' interactions effectively. The findings support the presence of user-oriented affordances, such as presentation flexibility, association and content association. These three affordances can be summarized in two higher-level ones: self-expression and connection (SEC) and persona-linked content (PLC). Our findings of the two dimensions, SEC and PLC, highlight the importance of targets and their connections in understanding social media interactions' dynamic nature.

By proposing to shift the focus from platforms to features, this study suggests that companies should focus on understanding the features they use for their users to interact with their brand, rather than merely ensuring that their company is omnipresent on all platforms. This study underlines the need to focus on features that will help managers influence interpersonal and user-brand communications and interactions on social media.

This research is the first to put features at the center of its investigation and quantitatively examine the relationship between social media features and affordances in a social media context. In all, this research provides a new unit of analysis that is more suitable for researchers to build a robust conceptual foundation for affordances. We believe that conceptualizing audience and content as outcomes, distinguishing it from features and creating connections between them as affordances is the unique aspect of our conceptualization.

Social cognitive theory suggests that children may have more favorable attitudes toward food products promoted by media characters who are similar to them, in terms of factors such as age, gender and race-ethnicity. This paper aims to profile the characters in food and beverage websites and apps for children and examine whether the healthfulness of promoted products varies as a function of character background.

This study includes two parallel content analyses focused on websites and apps that were produced by America’s top selling food and beverage companies.

There were very few child-targeted websites and apps, but those that existed were replete with media characters. These websites/apps tended to feature media characters with diverse gender, age and racial–ethnic backgrounds. However, marketing featuring adult and male characters promoted particularly unhealthy foods.

American food companies, many of whom signed voluntary self-regulatory pledges through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, should make a more concerted effort to refrain from featuring appealing media characters in child-directed new media marketing. Whether conscious or not, it seems as if food marketers may be leveraging characters to appeal to a wide audience of children of varied demographic backgrounds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the only research to focus specifically on the demographic profiles (i.e. gender, age and race-ethnicity) of characters in food websites and the nutritional quality of the products they promote. It is also the first to systematically examine media characters in food apps in any capacity.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the relationship between the features of social media and knowledge sharing, and to examine how ambient awareness mediates this relationship.

An experiment is designed to stimulate the knowledge work in a famous Chinese business college and 156 valid samples were obtained. AMOS was used in this paper to examine the theoretical model.

There is a correlation among features of social media, ambient awareness and knowledge sharing. Surprisingly, network translucence, which indicates individuals’ meta-knowledge of others’ connections, has no influence on knowledge sharing. Although this is inconsistent with conjecture of the existing literature, it can be well explained by the phenomenon in real life, such as privacy setting in social media.

For employees who use social media to promote knowledge sharing within organizations, this study reminds them of the importance of ambient awareness. For managers, this study can give them some suggestions to make employees take full advantage of social media to achieve optimal benefits of knowledge sharing, thus improving organizational performance and innovation. For social media designers, they can make social media more useful in knowledge work by improving its specific features.

This paper proposes that ambient awareness is the mediator of the effect path between communication and knowledge sharing. And the status perception of coworkers’ exchanging information is closely related to knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper from the series “Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research” is to look into different approaches to study uses of social media platforms – from user statistics to motivations for using specific features within a platform.

Based on a literature review some general findings on social media usage are summarized alongside with examples of user activities that are rarely studied.

The paper concludes that social media research has neglected to question the use of more recent features in social media platforms, such as Twitter favorites or Facebook hashtags, as well as the more “destructive” activities in social networking such as unfollowing.

The paper draws attention to some features of popular social media platforms which are currently understudied. It raises awareness for these specific gaps in social media research and could inspire future studies to close the gap.

This study explores the pioneering approach of utilising machine learning (ML) models and integrating social media data for predicting tourist arrivals in Sri Lanka.

Two sets of experiments are performed in this research. First, the predictive accuracy of three ML models, support vector regression (SVR), random forest (RF) and artificial neural network (ANN), is compared against the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model using historical tourist arrivals as features. Subsequently, the impact of incorporating social media data from TripAdvisor and Google Trends as additional features is investigated.

The findings reveal that the ML models generally outperform the SARIMA model, particularly from 2019 to 2021, when several unexpected events occurred in Sri Lanka. When integrating social media data, the RF model performs significantly better during most years, whereas the SVR model does not exhibit significant improvement. Although adding social media data to the ANN model does not yield superior forecasts, it exhibits proficiency in capturing data trends.

The findings offer substantial implications for the industry's growth and resilience, allowing stakeholders to make accurate data-driven decisions to navigate the unpredictable dynamics of Sri Lanka's tourism sector.

This study presents the first exploration of ML models and the integration of social media data for forecasting Sri Lankan tourist arrivals, contributing to the advancement of research in this domain.

Charitable crowdfunding features are embedded in social media platforms to encourage pro-social behaviors. Although such new practice allows practitioners to leverage the power of a highly connected crowd, accomplishing the fundraising goal is still a challenge. This study seeks to understand what drives the donation intention in charitable crowdfunding features on social media platforms by examining the roles of social experience, empathy and personal impulsiveness.

A survey questionnaire was distributed to social media users in China to collect data. A total of 206 valid responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that empathy mediates interaction with the fundraiser and perceived proximity with the donatee on a user's donation intention. We also found that social influence on social media platforms positively influences empathy and donation intention. In addition, personal impulsiveness was found to moderate the relationship between empathy and donation intention.

This study contributes to existing literature and practices. It identifies three dimensions of social experience and examines their effects on donation intention, providing insights into the charitable crowdfunding features on social media. Moreover, this study extends the understanding to empathy by delineating its mediating role in the relationship between social experience and donation intention and examining how personal impulsiveness moderates the effect of empathy on donation intention. Furthermore, this study provides valuable insights for practitioners to craft strategies to stimulate pro-social behaviors and increase donations.